She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself.
JOHN BERGERThe unsung, impersonal world remains outside, on the other surface of a placenta. All songs, even when their content or rendering is strongly masculine, operate maternally.
More John Berger Quotes
-
-
For those who are behind the curtain, landmarks are no longer only geographic but also biographical and personal
JOHN BERGER -
When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
JOHN BERGER -
Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity.
JOHN BERGER -
It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.
JOHN BERGER -
We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
JOHN BERGER -
A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you.
JOHN BERGER -
The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can’t do is to change its consequences.
JOHN BERGER -
Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.
JOHN BERGER -
Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one’s self to be bored.
JOHN BERGER -
The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared, you are both in that parenthesis. Its like a proscenium arch for a dialogue.
JOHN BERGER -
For the Cro-Magnons, space is a metaphysical arena of continually intermittent appearances and disappearances.
JOHN BERGER -
Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and, in this, hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
JOHN BERGER -
These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.
JOHN BERGER -
Buildings become furniture, courtyards become carpets and arrases, the streets are like galleries, the boulevards conservatories. It is a house, one or two centuries old, rich, bourgeois, distinguished. The only way of going out, or shutting the door behind you, is to leave the centre.
JOHN BERGER -
We can become anything. That is why injustice is impossible here. There may be the accident of birth, there is no accident of death. Nothing forces us to remain what we were.
JOHN BERGER -
One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating.
JOHN BERGER -
It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.
JOHN BERGER -
In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.
JOHN BERGER -
Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.
JOHN BERGER -
A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis.
JOHN BERGER -
The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.
JOHN BERGER -
(The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. To be naked is to be without disguises.
JOHN BERGER -
In the modern world, in which thousands of people are dying every hour as a consequence of politics, no writing anywhere can begin to be credible unless it is informed by political awareness and principles.
JOHN BERGER -
The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.
JOHN BERGER -
The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
JOHN BERGER -
You cant draw it for others. You can try, of course, but it doesn’t work. People obeying rules laid down my somebody else is not the same thing as respecting life. And if you want to respect life, you have to draw a line.
JOHN BERGER